


Cymbeline.

by orange_crushed



Category: Borgias - Ambiguous Fandom, The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Drug Addiction, Dubious Morality, F/M, Organized Crime, Sibling Incest, Triggers, Warning for brief animal cruelty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:30:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cesare finds out later who she is, and for a little while he thinks he is supposed to hate her, the half-sister who has everything he doesn't, everything Juan doesn't, everything she could ever want. But he doesn't hate her. He writes her name in the back of one of his notebooks: <i>Lucrezia</i>, Lucrezia, and then he closes the book and shoves it under his bed and forgets about it for a long, long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cymbeline.

Cesare is a month away from fifteen when the dog dies, when he finds Juan in the backyard over it. Juan is open-mouthed and red-faced, puffing out air in great heaving bursts still, making wheezing noises and wringing his hands around the bat, getting them bloody. Cesare notices the dog second, after, the broken little thing and the bright smears it made dragging itself through the grass. He gasps and Juan whirls and for a second doesn't actually see him, doesn't see anything: his eyes are black circles in his face, holes, and Cesare can see all the way to the bottom. 

"Juan," he says. He doesn't raise his voice. Mama isn't home, the neighbors aren't home, nobody saw this, nobody knows yet. "What did you do?" Juan looks at the ground and at the bat and then at Cesare, like he doesn't recognize anything. He throws the bat into the hedges.

"It bit me," Juan says. 

"It's- it was a _puppy_ ," Cesare says. He can't believe he has to say this. "Puppies bite, you fucking idiot."

Juan puts his hands up and shoves Cesare as hard as he can; Cesare rocks back on his heels and then rocks forward again, and now Juan is the one that has to move back. He swallows hard and makes a furious, twisted-up face.

"It was a dumb little rat."

"That's what you're going to tell mama?" Cesare says, calmly, and Juan freezes, goes totally still like a fucking icicle, and the color goes out of his skin. "That's what you're going to say?"

"No," Juan says. He wipes his face; he's forgotten what he has on his hands, Cesare realizes. When Juan's fingers come away from his forehead there are long rust-colored streaks across it, the trails of his palm like a stain, like finger-paint. He's shaking a little, now. Coming off the adrenaline. Cesare wonders if he's going to cry. Probably. "Can we- can we not?" he asks. "Can we not tell, can we- please?" His mouth screws up. "It was just a stupid dog, I don't-"

"Go get the bat," Cesare says. "Clean it off in the garage." He looks down between them. "I'll deal with this."

Juan runs away and Cesare kneels down, forces himself to look at the caved-in ribs and unrecognizable face, the places where the white fur is still clean and tufted, soft. His stomach lurches a little but he doesn't throw up, just tastes acid in his throat. He closes his eyes and still sees it. He opens them again and unfocuses until it's just red and white and green. Just colors. He gets up and goes into the house, gets plastic bags out of the cupboard and he bags it up, scrubs the yard with a towel and pulls up the grass around there, tries to get the bits and blood off. He drags over one of the old bikes from behind the garage, lays it down in the grass like it was left there carelessly. He puts the bags in the garbage can and goes inside to wash his hands. Juan is in the kitchen already, wearing a different shirt and drinking an orange soda. Cesare washes his hands carefully, gets under the nails, rubs his fingers under the hottest water he can stand. "Are you going to do this again?" he says, when he turns the tap off. Behind him, Juan makes some kind of offended noise, and Cesare turns with the hand towel clutched hard in both fists. "Are you?" he hisses. Cesare knows about the cat, he knows everything. "You gonna fucking do it again?"

"No," Juan says. "No. I won't."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

Even as he hears it, he knows it's a lie.

 

 

 

 

When Cesare was eight he saw his father on television for the first time, being escorted out of a courthouse on the news. It didn't look like him, like the Rodrigo who came over sometimes and played catch and brought him books and sneakers and brought Juan expensive embroidered sweatshirts with the logos of Los Angeles sports teams on the front. This Rodrigo was wearing a suit, a handsome dark suit and sunglasses, and there was a beautiful woman with him, a blonde woman Cesare didn't recognize. They looked like movie stars. They stopped on the courthouse steps and Cesare's father put his arm around the woman, and said he was grateful that justice was served, that he hoped to put all of these tragic events behind him for the sake of his family- and that's when Cesare's mother had come in and stared at Cesare like she'd caught him stealing, then switched the television to another channel and told him he was better off doing homework.

They didn't have the same last name, his mother and father, they didn't live in the same house, Cesare knew what divorce was, there were lots of divorced people in the world. It was sort of sad but also completely normal: Cesare's father had never lived at home, so he could never miss that. He did miss papa when he left, at least for the few days after he'd visit, when he'd sit staring at the books in a neat pile, and the bright new sneakers in the wrong size, still nestled in their box, and Juan would be crying bitterly and telling mama he wanted to go away, to live with papa instead. But Cesare knew that was impossible, and after the night he saw his father on the television, he knew why. That night he'd asked his mother if the woman on the television was their father's new wife, and Vannozza had smiled a very bitter smile and said,

"Sure, _corazón_ ," and gone back to cutting carrots. 

Everybody lies to Cesare, but it doesn't matter, he finds out the truth eventually. When he's eleven he discovers they'd never been married, mama and papa, they'd never lived in the same house: the fine big house his father used to live in was the one his mother used to clean, and that tells Cesare everything he needs to know.

 

 

 

 

They are invited to a party once, when he is twelve and Juan is almost eleven, a party at the even bigger and even finer house their father lives in now: there's a pool and a garden and a basketball court and a rented pony and more ice cream than Cesare has ever seen in once place, except at the grocery store. It is somebody else's birthday party and there are three hundred people there at least, and nobody really notices Cesare and Juan wandering around the backyard eating their fourth slices of cake. There's a face-painting clown that secretly terrifies Juan so Cesare dares him to do it, to get his face painted, and afterwards Juan comes back looking intense and murderous with tiger stripes all over his cheeks and Cesare laughs himself practically into the pool. Sometimes Juan is the best thing in the world. Cesare loses him somewhere in line for more soda and wanders into the back of the garden, away from the people watching the band play and the piles of presents, further and further back until he can barely hear the speakers, until he's pretty much lost. He turns a corner around some rosebushes and there is a small girl sitting in a pile of dirt, rubbing it into the pale pink sleeves of her dress, smiling privately to herself until she looks up and sees Cesare, and then she smiles even wider, like Cesare is somebody wonderful. She's no older than eight, pale and blonde and pretty like a painted angel.

"You're making a mess," he says to her, because he has a little brother, he knows that being a bigger child means stopping the littler ones from doing these kinds of things, cleaning them up, bringing them home. She keeps smiling at him, picks up a handful of dirt, and without breaking eye contact she scrubs it across her beautiful skirt.

"I didn't want to wear this dress," she says. "I wanted to be Batman. It's my party," she adds, and tilts her head. "Are you having fun?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I want everybody to have fun." She dusts her hands off and stands up, but one foot trips up in her skirt and she wobbles forward; Cesare sticks both hands out in front of him and catches her, and she looks up at him with wide, bright eyes. "Oops."

"Careful, Batman," he says, and she laughs so hard she squeezes both his hands tight, curls her fingers around his and laughs and laughs and laughs. He takes her back to the party after that and when the adults start freaking out about her clothes, he watches her bat her delicate eyelashes and tell them that she has a perfectly good costume she could put on instead.

"Goodbye," she says, as somebody is whisking her away to get changed. "Goodbye, boy!"

Cesare finds out later who she is, and for a little while he thinks he is supposed to hate her, the half-sister who has everything he doesn't, everything Juan doesn't, everything she could ever want. But he doesn't hate her. He writes her name in the back of one of his notebooks: _Lucrezia_ , Lucrezia, and then he closes the book and shoves it under his bed and forgets about it for a long, long time.

 

 

 

 

"I'd rather you didn't, Cesare."

"It'll pay for college," he says. He pushes the brochure across the table again, and his mother puts her hands up, glances at the ceiling, like God is hovering above her head and she wants him to see how unreasonable her son is. "Mama. Come on."

"No, no," she says, and touches her forehead. "I don't want to think about it, Cesare, there are other ways-"

"Not for me," he says. "Not for people like me." He knows that he's smart, smart enough, but his grades weren't that good, he could give two fucks about the War of 1812 and he spent a decent part of his time at school making sure Juan didn't start fights with littler kids or get his face kicked in by older ones. He could work days and go to community college nights, maybe. Or he could do this. He could be good at this, he could be really good at this. He's helped a couple of friends boost cars but he has a clean record still. He's not especially big but he's fast enough, he doesn't scare easily. They'll take him. Cesare makes an appointment with the recruiter, but on the day he's supposed to go, there's a long black car in front of the house. Cesare turns away from it, heads for the bus stop, but then his father gets out of the back of the car and holds his arms out. 

"Cesare," he says. "Cesare. I hear you're thinking about the future."

"I have to," Cesare says, because obviously somebody fucking has to, Vannozza's getting older, she's not going to be running Cheery-Clean forever, and Juan's useless as far as that goes. Rodrigo smiles and gestures him closer and when Cesare gets close enough to touch, Rodrigo puts his hands on Cesare's shoulders, rests them there and squeezes. Cesare tries not to look at his face, at the pleased expression there, tries not to jump like a dog for the tiniest amount of attention, of praise, but he can't help it, can't help leaning into it, smelling the cigar smoke and cologne, feeling stupidly elated to be this close. He's wired like this, like a fucked-up kid, he's just so fucking glad to see him sometimes. 

"Men like us," Rodrigo says, "we're always looking forward." He takes Cesare into the car and they drive around aimlessly all afternoon, talking about school and the army and then Rodrigo takes him to lunch at a restaurant Cesare's never been inside before, a place where they give him a tailored suit jacket to wear before they send him into the dining room. They sit at a corner table and Rodrigo's driver sits at the table behind them, looking at the door while Cesare looks at him. They get club sandwiches and Rodrigo asks if he's ever thought about business administration, finances, bookkeeping. "You've got a head for numbers, your mother says."

"Yeah," Cesare says. He eats a french fry. "My best grades are in math. I was going to take AP, but it costs extra." His father makes a sympathetic face, and it takes Cesare a second to remember that is father is fucking rich, he could have written a check and Cesare could have AP credits already, and Cesare almost gets up out of his seat and takes the jacket off. But he doesn't. 

"Cesare," his father says, thoughtfully, kindly. "I haven't been good enough to you. I haven't done enough for you." Cesare can't say anything. He can't make his mouth open and angry words come out, he feels tense and filled like a balloon, but he doesn't burst. Rodrigo pats his shoulder. "All that's going to change. Everything's going to change. From now on, _I'm_ thinking about your future. You understand me?"

"Um," Cesare says. "No."

Rodrigo laughs and laughs and slaps his back and calls the waitress over and asks her for a couple of glasses of scotch. Cesare starts to say that he's underage, but Rodrigo waves the waitress away and she comes back with the drinks and Cesare tries his, burns his throat with it, and even though tears well up a little in his eyes, he doesn't cough. He holds it in and breathes through his nose and feels warmth in his stomach, heat, like a tiny fire.

"Good man," Rodrigo says. And then: "So, son. Where do you want to go to college?"

"Where, like-"

"Like anywhere," his father says. 

 

 

 

 

The first summer he comes back from school Rodrigo tells him to come and live at the house with them, that there's an apartment above the pool house that would be perfect for him, that young men need their privacy, don't they Cesare. His father grins and nudges him in the shoulder and Cesare wonders if that's how they got here, all of them, if he and Juan were conceived in the pool house or the carriage house or whatever, in stolen moments before his father's wife got home, thanks to a young man's privacy. 

His mother pretends she has no opinions about it but Cesare can tell it upsets her; he says he'll leave the pool house and come back to stay for the summer but she says no, no, better that he keep him happy, better that he keep Rodrigo paying for things while it lasts. Juan is openly, bitterly jealous. He won't talk to Cesare at all. 

So when his father's out at dinner, late every night with all the guys that run his businesses, and his father's wife is in Portugal for months at a time, Cesare sits at the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, doing more readings, scrolling through textbook pages on the tablet Rodrigo bought him, eating pizza straight out of the box. It's been a couple weeks of that, and he's getting used to the silence, the soft sound of the water lapping into the filter, when all of a sudden somebody throws a shirt over his face and dives into the pool. Cesare peels the shirt away and watches a pale body slice through the water under the surface, reflecting the light in trembling waves where it kicks through the pool. The body comes up in a rush, a girl with blonde hair plastered on her head, hands wiping water out of her face. She opens her eyes and even though Cesare knows who she is abstractly, he recognizes her, too: the big eyes and soft lashes like a doe's, the way her smile curves up higher when those eyes land on him. She's wearing a cotton bra and underwear and they're soaked through. He's trying hard not to look at them, at her, at any part of her wet, shining skin. She's a kid. His kid sister. Kind of.

"You keep wrecking your clothes," he says, so awkwardly, and he wonders if he should just fucking drown himself now, since there's all this water handy. She stares at him, and then she looks down at herself and back up at him, and her mouth drops open. 

"Oh my God," she says. "That was you." Her face does a funny thing: sad and happy at the same time, like she's feeling something and doesn't know how to feel about it. "Hello, boy."

"Cesare," he says.

"I know your name," says Lucrezia. "I know."

She swims up and rests her arms on the edge of the pool and presses her front against the tiled edge and now he can look at her a little better, look at her face while she looks up at his. "You must work for my- for our father now," she says, after a little while.

"No," he says. "I'm going to school."

"What for?"

"Business administration," he says. "Finance minor."

"Oh," she says. Her mouth quirks up. "Is it incredibly boring?"

"No," he says. He looks at the tablet in his hands. "Yes. Sometimes." Lucrezia laughs out loud and then holds her wet hands out to him. "I can't, I'll-"

"You'll what?" she says. "Have too much fun?" He looks at her and puts the tablet on top of the pizza box and then he pitches forward, splashing, diving down to send a wall of water over her head. He comes up and she's sputtering, cracking up, slapping the surface of the pool to spray his face a little. He grabs her and ducks them both down and Lucrezia twists around in his arms and they come up gasping. She squirms against him, lithe and slippery and he holds her tighter. The water's cold and she's warm, so warm, hot wherever they touch. She manages to get free and then she pushes his face into the pool and breaks away, still giggling. He chases her in circles and then they end up floating in the shallow end, paddling back and forth together. Cesare tells her about college, because she's curious, she's fifteen and her friends are already taking SAT prep courses, getting tutors, making their volunteer hours with Habitat for Humanity or their churches or their equestrian clubs, rich fucking teenagers padding their flimsy baby resumes. "Are they really that hard?" she asks. "I hate exams." She holds her hand up above their heads, dripping, and the pool lights turn it into a mosaic of blue and green and white, rippling patterns on the surface of her skin. "I hate to think somebody would look at my score and think, that was all I was. That was all there was to me."

"The SATs are a scam," Cesare says. He leans back against the wall of the pool, tilts his head up towards the night sky, the faint stars there. "They make money for a testing company. That's all they do." Lucrezia looks at him over her shoulder.

"How'd you score?"

"Aced it," he says. "That's how I know they're garbage."

"Cesare," she says, like a warning, like she fucking knows him, like this little girl knows anything about him, "don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you aren't smart."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a lie," Lucrezia says, and paddles away. She looks at him from the edge of the pool and then she stands up, water streaming off her, down the long ends of her hair, the tips of her fingers, currents running down the curving tops of her thighs. She stands and shivers in the cooling air, and stares him down. "I can tell," she says. She picks up her shirt from the edge of the pool and goes into the house. Cesare swims another couple of laps and then he gets out and goes back to the pool house, takes a shower to get the chlorine off and lies in bed afterwards trying not to think about water running down her neck, her shoulders, over the curve of her shoulderblades, the dip of her back and swell of her hip, tracing her outline, the soft shape of her against the pool lights, the glow of stars, like the rays around Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like she was cut out of light, hammered out of fireflies and sunshine, shaped and sanded that way, like she just happens to be a person: she could have been something else, a comet or a flower, she could have been anything.

In the morning Rodrigo takes him out to one of the construction sites, introduces him around as his son for the first time, and while Cesare is still standing there stunned everybody shakes his hand and looks at Rodrigo and waits for him to tell them what to do. Cesare is supposedly getting some kind of internship, he's going to shadow one of the site managers for the summer. He ends up getting coffee and running errands most days, and once or twice he drives his boss somewhere and picks up packages, and when Rodrigo asks him if he's enjoying himself, Cesare lies and says, 

"I'm learning a lot," and Rodrigo laughs and gets him a drink, and talks about next summer, setting him up at one of the clubs with his own office maybe, seeing if Cesare can handle some marketing stuff, if Cesare can balance their budget. Cesare promises he can. Rodrigo is home for dinner a little more, once or twice a week, and Lucrezia joins them, and they are three on those nights, Rodrigo at the head of the table and Cesare and Lucrezia across it, watching each other when the other isn't watching, pushing their pasta around the plate, cutting chicken into little pieces, speaking politely when spoken to. And afterwards they go swimming and Lucrezia asks him questions about his brother and his mother and Cesare asks her questions about their father, until they don't feel like talking anymore. They lie side-by-side on the plastic lounge chairs and Lucrezia points out constellations for him. She likes stars: and myths, legends, fairy tales. She knows them all. She's got stacks of books upstairs, Bulfinch's mythology and old Greek plays. In English. 

"That's Perseus," she says, pointing up. "He killed Medusa and took her head."

"That's the one with snakes for hair," he says. Lucrezia smiles, pleased, and he leans closer. "I saw that in a movie."

"If you looked into her eyes, you turned to stone," Lucrezia says. Cesare shuts his eyes and flails out with one hand, pretending to paw at Lucrezia's face, and she laughs out loud and slaps his hand away, then grabs it and holds it until he opens his eyes. She's staring at him, close and intent, narrowed to a cat's glare. "Got you," she says, seriously. "Made you look."

"You win," he says, and pretends to die.

 

 

 

 

Cesare is twenty when he finds a discrepancy- and then a bunch of discrepancies- in the accounts for the club. He doesn't say anything to Donny the manager, he just makes a couple of photocopies and takes them downtown to his father's office, and together they sit there and go through things, and afterwards Rodrigo leans closer and asks if he's told anyone else about this.

"No," Cesare says. "Just you." Rodrigo smiles and tells him he's doing well, he's already demonstrating what a good head he has on his shoulders. And then when Cesare goes into the club office the next morning, there is somebody new at Donny's desk, Orsino, an unsmiling guy who tells Cesare that Donny has gone on vacation. Cesare shrugs and acts like he's not worried about it, but at lunchtime he goes across the street to the pizza place and orders a parm sandwich and then locks himself in their restroom for a couple of minutes to wash his face and stare into the mirror. He looks at himself for a long time. And then he dries his face and goes out and pays for his sandwich and takes it back across the street and eats it at his desk, in front of Orsino, like everything is normal. Cesare doesn't taste the sandwich, but he eats the whole thing and gets back to work. 

It's not like Cesare didn't know. But there is knowing and then there is _knowing_ , and he can't pretend anymore. It's not like the stolen cars when he was fifteen, like catching Juan with weed and stealing it and smoking it all on the roof of the garage. It's not like that at all, it's bigger. It's so big it weighs on his chest like a stone. That night alone in the pool house he thinks about packing a bag, going back to his mom's house, dropping out of school and just- _just what_ , he thinks. He's going to run away? With his mom and Juan, or by himself? Or maybe he could go into the army after all, he could get a job somewhere doing books with his half of a degree. Maybe. His father's already shelled out fifty thousand bucks for tuition and housing, paid for all his meals and books. It doesn't mean he owns Cesare, but it doesn't mean nothing. His father is a businessman, his father invests. Invests in things he thinks will yield something better. He's invested in Cesare, now. Cesare puts his duffel back into the closet and goes downstairs and finds Lucrezia swimming laps in the pool. She rolls onto her back and swims a slow backstroke and tells him all about the television shows she's watching.

As the summer goes on, Orsino starts asking Cesare for ideas about stuff. He's not like Donny: he listens when Cesare talks, nods his head and asks questions. He never fucking smiles, though. Cesare thinks he's kind of an asshole. But Cesare is also surprised to find that he himself does have ideas about things, about how things ought to get done, and that they're not half-bad. The club is making money again, and by the end of August it's making a lot _more_ money, and Rodrigo throws Cesare a kind of going-away party for the start of school, gets a bunch of catered food and a seriously ridiculous bar and invites a bunch of guys Cesare doesn't know yet, but knows he will soon. They shake Cesare's hand while Rodrigo stands behind him patting his shoulder and talking about the prestigious internship Cesare's been awarded for the spring, working two days a week for a city accounting firm. It's incredibly fucking embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as the fact that Cesare feels thrilled to hear it, that he flushes with praise when Rodrigo goes on and on about him. He escapes from it as soon as he can. When the party is mostly over Lucrezia finds him out in the garden, wandering circles around the roses with an unfinished cocktail in a plastic cup. He's not as drunk as he is tired, but he still sways when she comes into his space, crowds close to him and picks at the front of his t-shirt. 

"I'll miss you," Lucrezia says, standing on her toes to kiss his cheek. She smells like chlorine, a little, but also like her fancy floral shampoo. Cesare hugs her loosely until she tightens her arms around his neck, and then he hugs her as hard as he wants to, feels her heart pound against his through her dress. "I'll miss you," she says, softly, quietly, like somebody could hear them, out here in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. There's nothing to hear. They're fine, they're okay. There's nothing wrong with this, with her, with him. They're family.

"I'll be back," he says. When they pull apart he cups her face with one hand and kisses her temple. "Soon."

 

 

 

 

"Christ," Cesare says. He kneels down by the body and looks at the mashed-in face, the bullet holes in the chest, the sluggish way blood is still seeping out of the back of the guy's jacket, spreading in a puddle on the floor. "What the fuck did you do?"

"He started it," Juan says, from the other side of the room. He's holding a bloody shirt up against his face, trying to tilt his nose so it stops running. It's not actually broken. Mike is hanging back in the doorway. He's got his arms crossed over his chest. Cesare sighs and looks at Mike and Mike looks back, evenly; he doesn't have to say anything for Cesare to understand how fucked this is. Mike thinks Juan is a one-hundred-percent certified fucking dipshit, and on most days Cesare agrees with him. This is one of those days.

"You call anybody else?"

"No," Juan says, sullenly. "I called you."

"Fuck." Cesare puts a hand over his face for a second and then pulls it together. "I'll tell Rodrigo."

"Tell him _what_?"

"You didn't have a choice, right?" Cesare says. He closes the space between them, points a finger into Juan's stomach. "This guy drew on you. Say it."

"He drew on me," Juan repeats. He scowls. "Fucker drew on me. Juan fucking Borgia."

"Cattaneo," Cesare corrects. Juan doesn't say anything to that, just scrubs at the skin under his nose. "You were supposed to talk to him. Talk, Juan. Rodrigo's going to have to smooth things over with Leo if anybody finds out. He's not going to be happy about it."

"He should be happy I'm alive," Juan says.

Mike gets to work and the body goes wherever bodies go when Mike doesn't want them found, and Cesare drives Juan to Cesare's apartment in Juan's hideous yellow Corvette, while Juan bitches about how the guy tried to cheat him, tried to offer him half of what they were supposed to be getting, didn't the guy know who the fuck he was? Cesare takes him inside and gets him cleaned up, makes him change his shirt, and Cesare bags Juan's shirt up to burn later. When he glances outside, Cesare can see his own car- his boring black sedan- parked on the opposite curb already, Mike having followed them and then taken off again, already gone somewhere to do Mike shit. Cesare reminds himself to buy the guy a bottle of something dark and fucking expensive. He doesn't know what Mike drinks, if Mike drinks, if Mike eats or sleeps, or if the guy is just a perfect terrifying robot designed to clean up the Borgias' endless messes. Cesare wonders where they can get a dozen more of him: probably nowhere on earth. Cesare wonders what it says about him that Mike is probably his best friend right now.

Cesare calls Rodrigo and lays it out and gets screamed at for a couple minutes; Cesare waits the storm out and then Rodrigo is all concern again, begging Cesare to take care of his brother, to take care of himself, to be cautious, to come to the house tomorrow and have dinner because Rodrigo's got a lot of things he needs to run through with Cesare, projects that need tending. And then he asks Cesare to put Juan on the phone. Cesare goes out on the balcony to give them some privacy, but he can hear Juan anyway. "No," Juan says. "Yes. Yes, father. No. I tried to. I barely escaped with my life." There's a pause, and then sharp laughter. "That's what I told him. He should have known better. Borgias don't take shit from anybody."

Juan drinks the rest of a bottle of rum and falls asleep on the couch in front of the Real Housewives of where the fuck ever, and Cesare sits down to finish the account logs he was working on when he got the call. He's done around one in the morning. He checks his email again and there's one from Lucrezia, telling him about her brand-new sorority sisters, the party they're having over the weekend for spring fling. He blinks and reads it twice and realizes it's an invitation, she wants him to come on Friday and stay. He thinks about that. Driving north along the coast and picking her up, taking her to dinner someplace nice, someplace nicer than the college shitbags she dates would ever think to take her. Going to a college party again, pretending he's still a kid, leaving all this behind for a couple of days. _Fuck it_ , Cesare thinks. He emails her back and tells her he's coming the day after tomorrow. He sleepwalks through dinner and the meeting with Rodrigo and nods his head in the right places, gets shit organized at the office on Friday morning and then Rodrigo meets him in the doorway when he's leaving, tells him if he's going out of town, he ought to take Juan too.

"He needs a break, don't you think?" Rodrigo says, smiling. "Family vacation." Cesare knows he's right, it's better to get Juan the fuck out of town for a few days, let him cool off while things get patched over, but a childish voice inside him starts screaming at the idea. 

"Yeah," he says. "Definitely."

He drives Juan's ugly car up the coast. When they stop for gas and Juan gets out to use the bathroom, Cesare calls Lucrezia and tells her he's bringing Juan too, that Juan really wants to see her and make sure she's having a good time at school.

"Does he," Lucrezia says, slowly. Cesare laughs. "I don't care. It's fine. Just hurry. I want to see you."

Dinner is awkward and Juan makes fun of Lucrezia's friends, tells Lucrezia she ought to foot the bill since she's the trust fund baby. Cesare pays for it, embarrassed and furious, and tells Juan to shut the fuck up. The party on Saturday night is kind of ridiculous; college kids are just as fucking stupid as when Cesare was in college, and rich ones doubly so. Somebody sells Juan a dozen pills that make him take his shirt off and climb onto the roof. The whole party piles out into the yard and cheers for him and Juan pretends like he's going to jump off, laughing hysterically when a couple of sorority girls scream and freak out. Cesare gets him down and Juan puts his arms around Cesare and says that he loves him, that Cesare is the only thing he loves, well okay he also loves mama, but him and Cesare are in this together, and Cesare pats his back and tells him it's cool, they're cool, Juan doesn't have to worry about anything. After that Juan passes out on the couch with a couple of people and Cesare and Lucrezia go upstairs and curl up together on her bed, with her face mashed into his shirt and her arm around his waist. Cesare strokes her hair and listens to the music playing loud through the floor. "The room's spinning," she says, "every time I close my eyes." She twines their fingers together. "Chezza. Keep me awake."

"How?"

"Tell me a story," she says. 

"Scary story?"

"No," she says, and slaps his chest with the flat of her hand. Cesare laughs and grabs her fingers again, and Lucrezia rubs her face into his shirt. "You're so terrible."

"Love story, then," he says. Lucrezia tilts her head back to smile up at him. She's drunk and a little sweaty and she looks like a fucking radiant angel with her curls coming loose around her face.

"A love story," Lucrezia says. "Please."

 

 

 

 

Juan's been using for a long time, longer than Cesare can be sure of, but it gets worse after that, through the long summer. Juan disappears for days at a time and comes back with huge dark circles under his eyes and a strange hungriness to everything he does. He yells at everybody and then he's manically charming again, telling stories across the dinner table that make Rodrigo crack up and slap his knees and wipe tears out of his eyes. Juan's got a couple of guys that follow him around everywhere now, guys he picked up somewhere that run errands for him. They're assholes. Cesare asks Rodrigo if he can send them the fuck away and get a couple of their own guys to keep an eye on Juan, but Rodrigo tells him that Juan's got charisma, Juan's a natural leader, he doesn't need supervision as much as he needs a chance to demonstrate himself. Rodrigo gives Juan one of the smaller clubs to run, and by July Juan is high all the fucking time, waking up at three in the afternoon and sitting in the upstairs room at the club every night with the guys that Cesare hates. Mike offers to kill those guys and Cesare gives it serious thought before he says no. Sometimes Juan shows up at Cesare's apartment at four in the morning, sitting on a stool in Cesare's kitchen and eating cold cuts out of their packages and asking Cesare if anybody can actually love anyone else, or if love is a lie, if being human is a joke, if being a person is actually no different than being a cat or a dog or a housefly, if you opened up a person would you be able to tell if they loved anything, if there was really a place in the heart where those things rested.

"Mary, mother of God," Cesare says, standing barefoot in his boxers on the cold kitchen floor. "Juan, go home or go the fuck to sleep."

"I can't sleep," Juan tells him. "Not anymore." He rolls up a slice of ham and eats it, and stares out into the darkness of the living room like he's looking up from the bottom of a well. 

Cesare tries to spend more time with him. He takes him out to dinner with a few of the guys, and makes Juan's creepy flunkies stay at home. They take their mother shopping and get her new curtains, a new dishwasher to replace the old one, and Juan takes her out to lunch wearing one of Cesare's boring black suits. Cesare lets Juan crash on his couch for a few days and they order pizza and play cards for pocket change like they used to as kids, when pocket change was all they had. He takes Juan into the office with him and has him make some deliveries: he makes Juan check in with him on the phone before and after, even though Juan says _sí, sí mama_ in a whiny voice when he picks up.

And then Juan gets higher than a fucking kite and beats the living shit out of a working girl and her on-again off-again boyfriend, out in back of the club he runs, and Rodrigo sends him to a private rehab center in Malibu. Juan spends all of August and September detoxing and throwing up and wearing cotton robes and talking to counselors, and Cesare spends almost all of that with Lucrezia.

He takes her to the beach in Santa Barbara and dumps her in the ocean and carries her out again and then rubs aloe into her back when she burns. Instead of staying at her summer house with all her roommates he pays for the two of them to stay at a resort in a suite overlooking the ocean, with a big balcony that they sit on together, Cesare leaning back in a lounge chair and Lucrezia straddling his lap, because her back hurts too much to sit any way but forward. She's got cucumber slices lined up on her skin- his mother taught him how to do that- and she's drifting, half-asleep, with her body bent into his like a comma, her elbows tucked against his ribs. Her bikini top is untied in back so that the strings don't rub her raw. Cesare's trying not to touch her. She yelps whenever he touches the backs of her arms or her neck, those pink places where the sunscreen wasn't enough. He can touch her face though, so he strokes her cheeks with his thumbs and kisses her forehead. Lucrezia sighs and nuzzles her face into the space between his neck and shoulder, and it's intimate enough already before she kisses his throat, mouthing the skin gently between her lips and then pressing them over that spot. Cesare freezes. His hands freeze, his brain freezes, he can't move.

"It's okay," Lucrezia murmurs. "It's us." She kisses his neck again and melts against him a little more, sighs and squirms in his lap, and Cesare still doesn't know what the fuck to do. He's getting hard and she doesn't seem to care, she's just sinking down onto him, letting her hips rest against his and leaning her face on his shoulder. She tilts her face up for a kiss and Cesare gives it to her, because there's nothing in the world he wouldn't hand to her if she wanted: his heart on a silver platter, somebody else's heart, the moon. He kisses her deep and opens their mouths together and holds the back of her head tenderly with one hand, running his fingers through her hair, sucking her bottom lip before he pulls away. She stares up at him, mouth red and lush, and she smiles. "I love you," she says. 

"I love you, too," he says. His voice shakes on it a little, he can't believe he's- but of course he loves her, he's supposed to love her, he just, he just loves her a little bit wrong, that's all.

She gets up after that and goes to sleep face-down on the satin comforter and Cesare takes a shower and jerks off against the wall and bites into his own hand to keep from making a noise when he comes.

In the morning she takes a shower before he wakes up and then climbs over him naked, still damp and steaming, and when Cesare opens his eyes she sits back on her heels and brushes the wet hair over her shoulders. Cesare startles and crawls backwards with both hands until he runs into the headboard and bangs his elbow, and Lucrezia laughs and slides closer. "No," he says. "Lucrezia. No." She looks down at herself: the perfect globes of her breasts and the swell of her hips from her waist, the pale tops of her thighs that he longs to run his hands across.

"Oh," she says, in a very soft voice. "You don't- am I not-"

"Lucrezia," he says, horrified. "You're beautiful. You're so beautiful, fuck, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. But we can't. It's not- we can't do this, it's not right." Lucrezia looks at him thoughtfully and then down at herself again. She runs a hand around the bone of her kneecap, traces the line of her leg upwards towards her hip, then slips a hand between her thighs; Cesare makes a strangled sound and Lucrezia lifts her eyes to smile at him, sort of dangerously, like she knows something he's only starting to understand.

"It feels right," she says.

_Christ_ , he thinks. It does.

 

 

 

 

Cesare goes to pick Juan up himself, partly because their father is busy and partly because he wants to see Juan, wants to hold him and look at his face. Juan comes out of the residence area with his bags already packed; he's pale but he looks good, he's put on six pounds or so and he's really smiling when he sees Cesare in the lobby, he throws his arms wide and Cesare grabs onto him, hugs him tight and shuts his eyes for a second. Juan smells like a hospital room, scrubbed clean. Cesare holds him at arm's length and tells him he looks pretty good.

"Fuck you, I look fantastic," Juan grins. 

They stop at a place on the coast highway and get hamburgers and eat them in the car and Cesare doesn't talk business at all: he talks about Rodrigo gaining a little weight of his own, their mom joining a book club, Lucrezia getting more serious about theater stuff and finally switching to a drama major. He saw one of her high school plays a couple of years ago, watched her walk across the stage, all her gestures graceful and her speech perfect and clear, sweet and charming and natural, everything about her screaming _star star star_ , while ugly high school boys stammered through their lines. He remembers the pancake makeup she had to wear, how she left big red lipstick kisses on his paper program like an old Hollywood actress. She could be famous if she wanted to be, she could be partying right now with agents and getting cast in summer movies about teenagers getting murdered and making a million dollars, Cesare really believes that. But she's serious about doing stuff on stage, she knows the names of all these dead directors, she makes Cesare take her to the Shakespeare festival every year and spends all the intermission leaning on his shoulder telling him about other productions, how somebody in Venice actually did _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ on a floating stage.

"I have tickets to her next one," he says. "You should come."

"Sure," Juan says. "Maybe I will."

They meet Rodrigo and a couple of the guys at the club for dinner that night and Juan's unusually quiet, watching everybody almost silently, smiling when they laugh, nodding his head and answering questions as briefly as he can. Rodrigo leans close to him all night and keeps patting his shoulder and ordering more wine, even after Juan says he's not drinking tonight, thanks. Cesare drives Juan back to Juan's apartment and Juan stands in the middle of the living room looking around blankly at the bare walls and the leather couches with a bunch of clothes strewn everywhere, his giant television and his gleaming stainless steel fridge with nothing inside.

"I can take you grocery shopping tomorrow," Cesare says, and Juan throws his bag down onto the floor.

"I can do it myself," he says.

"Fine, yeah," Cesare says. "Anything you want."

When Cesare gets back to his place Mike is sitting on the couch already, flipping through Cesare's DVR. He doesn't have a key to Cesare's apartment but it's not like he needs one.

"Your brother's back," he says. He points at the television. "What the fuck is this?" Cesare turns to look and sees that Mike has found all his recorded episodes of _Teen Wolf_ and is staring at them in undisguised, judgmental horror. Cesare flips him off and grabs the remote out of his hands.

"Lucrezia's watching it," he says, like that excuses it. "Fuck you, you like the fucking cooking channel."

"That's educational," Mike says. "They know how to hold knives." Cesare snorts and sits down and puts the cooking channel on and throws the remote across the couch. Mike sits and watches it placidly for about fifteen minutes before he says, without looking at Cesare, "Is he going to be trouble?"

"Juan?" Cesare says. He thinks about it. "He's always trouble."

"Ah," says Mike.

"I don't know," Cesare says, and leans back, stares up at the ceiling. "I don't know what he's going to be."

 

 

 

 

One morning when Cesare comes into the office Juan is there before him, sitting alone with Rodrigo in side-by-side armchairs. They both look up when Cesare comes in and Rodrigo gets up and takes Cesare by the arm and asks if he doesn't mind looking over the logs from yesterday, Rodrigo's got them spread out in the other room for him, he can go ahead and get started.

"No problem," Cesare says. Juan and Rodrigo smile at him and wait, and Cesare frowns. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Rodrigo says. "Just a little meeting. Nothing you need to worry about."

"I should hear it," Cesare says. 

"Cesare," Rodrigo says, smiling. "We talked about this. There are things- you've got enough on your plate, keeping the machine well-oiled. I need you thinking about that. Certain things, it's better if you're not involved."

Rodrigo's explained all of this before, yeah, Rodrigo's talked about plausible deniability and keeping the finances clean, keeping Cesare out of things as much as possible because Cesare's name is on a lot of paperwork, Cesare's degree is hanging up in the office. Cesare finds it fucking hilarious because everything he doesn't know, Mike does, and so Cesare knows everything. Cesare has helped scrape bodies off the floor- okay, not in a planned kind of way, more as damage control- and his father's still worried about him keeping his nose clean. Cesare is past his neck in this family's garbage and Rodrigo is trying to keep him away from the crumbs. Cesare puts his hands up and smiles and says okay, fine, whatever's best for the family, and then he calls Mike and gets him to tail Juan for the next couple of days. 

And then Cesare finds out what Rodrigo has Juan doing, and he almost loses his fucking mind. Cesare meets Rodrigo at home after dinner, asks to see him outside, and he paces around the pool while Rodrigo smokes and sips his scotch and watches Cesare with calm, hooded eyes until Cesare can pull himself together enough to get the thought out.

"You have him- you have him meeting suppliers," Cesare says. "He's a fucking _addict_ , he's recovering, you can't- you can't put him into this-"

"Juan can handle himself," Rodrigo says. "He had a little breakdown, but he's strong. He's getting past it. He needs to prove to himself he can."

"That's a nice idea," Cesare says.

"Watch it," Rodrigo says.

"Let me do it." Cesare stops pacing, squares up and looks him in the eye. "Let me take care of it."

"No."

"Dad," Cesare says. He never says that word, but it comes out of him sometimes when he can't stop it. "Dad, please. Let me do this for you. For us."

"No, Cesare," Rodrigo says, and that's it, solid as a verdict, the final word. "You do enough. Take it easy. It's going to be fine." He pats Cesare and ambles back into the house and Cesare stands and watches the pool water sway and lick the tiled walls and scatter light across the patio in broken little waves. He goes home and gets drunk and calls Lucrezia and gets her voicemail and says _I love you, I love you, I wish you were right here, I'm so fucking selfish, I'm sorry_. He falls asleep and wakes up in the middle of the afternoon and she's sitting at the edge of his bed in a cotton sundress tied at the shoulders with string.

"I got your message," she says. She unties the strings and the top of her dress falls down; she stands up and slides it down over her hips. She crawls into bed in her underwear with him and curls up against his side and he just holds her, almost innocently, clutches her in his arms and wonders if this is a fucking dream, if he died and went to heaven. Except that can't be true because his head is pounding. "Cesare," she says. "You take care of everybody."

"No," he says. "Not good enough."

"Shh," she says. She closes her eyes and rests her cheek against him. Cesare closes his eyes, too, and feels her skin warm and bare on his, the breath swelling her out and the soft exhale of her air onto his chest. "I can take care of you. You just have to let me."

 

 

 

 

The deal goes fine and so does the next one but then something happens, there's a mistake and a missing shipment and fingers get pointed all around, and one of Juan's shitty guys turns up dead with nine broken fingers. Cesare gets Juan alone and asks him what the fuck is going on, and Juan shoves him away and tells him he's handling it. Cesare tries again, reminds him they're brothers, reminds him Cesare can help, Cesare will do anything he needs, if Juan will just let him. It doesn't work. Juan tells him to go fuck himself. 

Things cool off for a while and Juan starts coming around more for family dinners again; when Lucrezia's on break Juan takes her downtown to a trendy little black-box theater and sits at her elbow smiling at everything and asking her questions afterward, while Cesare sits on the other side and wonders what the fuck is going on. But he'll take it, it's good, it's something he always wanted for them, for them to really be friends at last. 

When Juan is around more Cesare doesn't know quite how to act, not anymore, now that things are kind of different; he moves away from Lucrezia when she sits too close, he doesn't let her sprawl into his lap and kiss the side of his face, he hugs her loose and pats her on the shoulder and he can see the clouds gathering in her eyes all through break. The couple of weeks she has off from school, they're almost never alone. Lucrezia starts treating him the same way he's been treating her, pleasantly aloof, smiling at him but not touching, and after a couple of days of that he feels pent-up and hysterical, he finds her in the hallway of the restaurant they're all at together and pulls her into a bathroom and locks the door and presses her against the wall with his hands around her waist, his mouth hot on hers. He sucks kisses down her throat and crushes her against him and Lucrezia's eyes sparkle at him again, her hands knot in his hair, and he wants to pull her skirt up and fuck her for the first time right there on the sink counter, wants to lick her open and make her come and take her home, take her a million miles away where nobody would know who the fuck they were, where it would be okay, where nobody would care. But he kisses her and then stops and holds her face in his hands and stares at her for a long time. She really is the most beautiful thing on earth, the sweetest thing, the only bright spot in his life that never goes out. He would happily go to hell for this, to stay here for a little while inside this dream. But he can't have her. He can't do that to her. He can't dare think about it.

"We can't," he says. "We can't."

"Cesare-" she says. Her eyes are shocked, her mouth starts to make an o. "We can, it's not-"

"We can't." He kisses her forehead and then lets her go, lets his arms drop to his sides; his fingers curl into the empty air, still longing to touch her. "And I won't."

"Chezza," she says. Now she's starting to cry. Helpless, angry tears. "Chezza, please don't. Please."

Cesare unlocks the door and walks out of the hall and out through the lobby, out the doors into the night air; he gets his car from the valet and drives all the way to the ocean and parks there and cries with his face in his hands like the fucking idiot asshole he is.

She doesn't call him. He finds out from Juan that she's got a new boyfriend, somebody in her drama program, a rich jerkoff called Antonio whose dad runs some kind of real estate corporation up in Napa.

"She sounds happy," Juan tells him. "She sounds like she's getting laid." Cesare tells him to shut the fuck up and get out of his apartment, he doesn't want to hear anybody talk about his fucking sister like that. "Right," Juan says. "You don't think about it. Sweet little Lucrezia. You don't think about daddy's perfect little princess getting plowed, ass up in the air-" he stops because Cesare hits him, hits him so hard he rolls off the sofa onto the floor. Juan lies there on his back, panting hard, and his eyes go wide and dark for a second, and then he starts laughing. 

"It's not funny, jackass."

"I think it is," says Juan.

 

 

 

 

One day Cesare gets a call on his private cell from a number he doesn't recognize. He stares at it for a while and then answers, and there's a hesitant little voice on the other end, a girl saying something about somebody somebody Lucy's brother.

"Lucrezia?" he says. He knows her WASP friends call her _Lucy_ even though it makes her uncomfortable, their mouths don't work right around the _crezia_ , they turn it into mush. "Yeah, this is her brother."

Apparently Lucrezia didn't show up for a party, and while that's not weird in itself, what _is_ weird is that she didn't come home the next day or the day after, and she didn't go to her early morning workshop today and she and Stephanie always go and get coffee after and now she's not answering her phone or her email and Antonio's not answering his phone either and Stephanie is starting to cry a little but because she's just really worried, okay. Cesare listens to all that calmly and says, "I'm sure she's okay, she's probably at Antonio's, but I'll make sure. Okay? I promise, she's fine, everything's fine." Stephanie thanks him and hangs up and Cesare makes a call on his other phone. Because they have a guy, a guy whose entire fucking job description is _make sure absolutely nothing fucking happens to Lucrezia Borgia ever_. The jerkoff lives right across the street from the drama club's house, he's supposed to drive her around and get her whatever she needs and stay out of her way the rest of the time and, of course, he's supposed to tell Cesare about anything strange the fucking second it happens. Cesare listens to the guy's phone ring and ring and gets his voicemail. He tries again while he's getting into the car and gets nothing, but then his personal phone lights up with two calls at once. Rodrigo and Mike. He takes Rodrigo.

"Cesare," Rodrigo says. He sounds like he's been crying, maybe, close to one of his towering rages. "Get here now." Cesare hangs up and drives over and puts Mike on speakerphone on the way.

"Letter came this morning, almost three hours ago. Your dad's fuckface assistant put it in with a pile of other mail."

"At the office?"

"The house," Mike says. "Black car came up to the main gate, guy in a balaclava taped the envelope onto it. Five million dollars cash, don't call the police, whatever, it's garbage. You can read it when you get here. I'm working on the security feed, trying to get a license plate. I don't know if there's a good enough shot."

"The _house_ ," Cesare repeats. He pounds the steering wheel with one fist and breathes through his clenched teeth. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"There was hair in it," Mike says. 

All the blood leaves Cesare at once; he feels cold inside like a drift of snow piling against the side of a ski lodge, like the far icy mountains he's seen at the house in Aspen. For a minute he is not a person anymore.

"Whoever it is," Cesare says, "they're going to die."

"Of course," Mike says, and hangs up.

Juan is already at the house when Cesare gets there, sitting on the couch next to their father, holding both his hands and saying he's going to take care of this, Rodrigo doesn't have to worry, anyone who thinks they can cross this family, hurt this family, is going to have to go through Juan to do it. Cesare stands in the doorway and watches, and finally Rodrigo looks up and sees him.

"You find her," Rodrigo says. "You bring her back."

"I promise," Juan says. 

"Whatever it takes," Rodrigo repeats. He isn't looking at Juan but at Cesare, straight and sharp into his eyes. "Whatever it takes."

 

 

 

 

Mike has guys working on the letter and the security feed but in the meantime Cesare needs to fucking do something, so he and Juan get into Juan's shitmobile and drive up to Santa Barbara. When the traffic opens up Cesare does about ninety miles an hour, even when Juan screams at him about ruining the fucking transmission. They go to her house first and Cesare leaves Juan to go through her stuff and ask the other girls questions and he goes across the street to Ricky's apartment and finds Ricky dead in the bathtub, wrapped up in the plastic shower curtain with about forty stab wounds to the chest. It looks like it's been a couple of days already, the place fucking stinks and Ricky is a bloated, crusting mess. It explains why they didn't get a call. Cesare calls Mike and then goes back across the street to find Juan sitting beside Stephanie, running a soothing hand across her back and promising Lucrezia's going to be home soon, that this is probably a big misunderstanding.

Cesare drives to Antonio's place, this fancy fucking top-story loft in a converted warehouse. The door is locked and nobody answers, so Cesare picks it and they go inside, rooting through all his mail and his trash. There's no laptop and no phone, and somebody's tossed clothes around like they were leaving in a hurry. Cesare calls Mike again.

"I want the kid," Cesare says. "Find me that fucking kid."

Between them asking around with all the drama kids and driving the city and Mike doing whatever it is Mike does, they get a description of Antonio's car and then find it parked behind a frat house. Cesare leaves Juan behind the wheel, running the engine, and goes in alone. He's got gloves on and a Beretta in the back of his pants in case of whatever, but all he finds is Antonio and another college douchebag playing Mario Kart in one of the back rooms. Antonio's wearing pajama pants and laughing through a mouthful of chips until he sees Cesare standing in the doorway, and then he shrieks- the kid actually fucking screams- and jumps up like he's going to make for a window. Cesare catches him, grabs a handful of his hair and slams his face into the wall, and Antonio crumples down holding his face and babbling shit about how he doesn't know, he doesn't know anything. The other kid is trying to dial nine-one-one on his smartphone with shaking hands. Cesare takes it away from him and throws it against the wall and it shatters into a million cheap plastic parts. "Antonio," he says, and Antonio looks up in terror, still holding onto his face with both hands. There's blood from his nose and mouth smeared across his fingers. "Explain to your friend that you know me."

"I k-know him," Antonio says. "We're cool. Don't call anybody. Okay? Don't tell anybody about this." The other kid nods and Cesare drags Antonio up from the floor.

"We're going to go for a ride and come back," Cesare says. He throws a controller into the other kid's lap. "Keep playing."

He takes Antonio out to the car and puts him in the backseat and they drive around for a while while Antonio begs them to let him go and promises he didn't have anything do do with it. "To do with _what_?" Cesare hisses, and Antonio's mouth drops open and then his face crumples up and he looks like he's going to lose it. He keeps leaning forward to touch Cesare's shoulder, like he's sorry, like he wants Cesare to forgive him. He doesn't look at Juan at all, doesn't say anything to him, or act like there's anyone else in the car.

"With anything," he says, earnestly. "I didn't have anything to do with anything."

There's a boarded-up factory north of the city that Cesare knows so they take him there, they drag him out of the car and into one of the old offices, sit him down in a metal chair and Cesare pulls a knife and says,

"Where the fuck is my sister?"

"I don't know, I don't-" Antonio breaks off in a wail when Cesare goes behind him and wraps and arm around his shoulder and presses the blade against his throat. He holds onto Cesare's arm and kicks his feet until Cesare presses tighter and a little bit of blood wells to the surface by the tip. " _Jesus_ , Jesus Christ," Antonio gasps. "He said it was nothing. He said it was a prank."

" _Who_?"

"He said it would be funny- for her birthday, it was gonna be for her birthday, just a prank, Jesus, I didn't know!"

"Her birthday's in April, you fuck," Cesare says. He lets go and shakes him by the front of his shirt. "Who's the fucking _guy_?" Antonio swallows and for the first time, he looks at Juan, standing silently over by the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. Cesare watches him, watches his eyes flicker between the two of them.

"Ricky," he says, finally. "Her bodyguard. He picked her up with another guy. They pretended it was an emergency. But they were supposed to take her to the party. I was gonna meet her there, I had these- I had roses and shit, it was a surprise, like _ha ha_ , she was gonna be- just a little _scared_ ," he gasps. "And then she didn't show up and she didn't answer her phone and I thought, I thought- I knew I fucked up," he says, and starts to cry in earnest. He sobs into his hands while Cesare stares at him. "I fucked up, I should have told somebody, I was just so scared. I didn't do anything, I didn't, I swear to God I didn't know."

"Who was the other guy?" Juan asks. Cesare and Antonio both turn to look at him. "Could you pick him out if you saw him again? Can you describe him?"

"I don't know," Antonio says, slowly. "Probably not. I've never seen him before."

"Try," Cesare says.

"He was kind of short. He had a leather jacket on, this ugly shirt with like, fake tattoos on it. That's all. I swear to God that's it, that's everything." He looks up and sniffles. "What are you going to do to me?"

"It depends."

"Depends on what?"

"On how fast I fucking _find her_ ," Cesare says, and hits him, knocks him out of the chair, kneels down and hits him again in the face a couple of times, rams a fist into his belly until the kid chokes and sobs hard, curls into himself and cries like a baby into his elbows. Cesare gets up and walks a circle around the room with his hands in his hair, trying to breath through his nose and get his heart to calm down. Antonio stops crying and lies still on the floor, sniffing and covering his face and basically pretending to be dead. 

"I love her," Antonio says. Quietly, into the floor. "I'd never hurt her."

Jesus, Cesare actually believes him.

"Get up," he says, finally. He looks at Juan and gestures down at Antonio. "Get him up." 

"You're buying this?" Juan says. "You don't want-"

"I said get him up," Cesare repeats. He wipes the knife off on his jeans, just a couple of drops that barely leave a mark. Juan shrugs and he pulls the kid up and they take him out to the car and take him back, leave him on the sidewalk in front of the frat house with blood and snot streaked down the front of his shirt. Cesare rolls down the car window and they look at each other, him and Antonio, for a long second. "Move away," Cesare says. "Change schools. Don't ever fucking talk to her again. You don't exist."

"Okay," Antonio says. "Just, will you tell her-"

But Cesare's already rolling the window up, telling Juan to pull away from the curb. They leave him there and a couple of minutes later Cesare's phone rings, and Mike's got them an address.

 

 

 

 

Cesare's blood is boiling but he still wants to wait for Mike to meet them. It's the smart thing to do. It betters the odds. He doesn't dare fuck this up. They sit parked down the street from the house, looking at the two cars in the driveway, one of them the black car from the security tape and the other a hideous little Honda that Cesare thinks he's seen before. He can't remember where. They sit surveillance and the whole time Juan makes a big fucking stink about what they could be _doing_ to her, how long she's been _gone_ , what would _dad_ say if he knew they waited, and finally Cesare can't stand it anymore and they get out of the car and jog along the block in the dark, moving behind abandoned buildings to the back of the house. Cesare throws his jacket over the chain link so they can go over it silently, and then they crouch next to the back door. It's a shitty squat house in a nothing town outside of Santa Barbara, the windows are boarded over but Cesare can see light between the cracks, flickering a little like it's coming from a television set. Nobody inside seems to be moving around.

"I want them alive," Cesare whispers. Juan looks like he's going to argue for a second, and then nods. Cesare picks the back lock and pulls the back door open slowly; when it creaks he stops and waits, but they don't hear anything but canned laughter from the tv. He gets the door open slowly and they slip inside, into a kind of mudroom with a bunch of old broken boots and cardboard boxes piled up. Cesare takes a breath and goes through the kitchen door. There's a guy in an undershirt and track pants standing by the fridge; he's got a Glock stuck in his waistband and he drops his slice of pizza in shock and goes for the gun when Cesare comes through, but Cesare shoots him right in the fucking kneecap and the guy goes down howling. Cesare yanks the gun away from him and kicks him in the face and a second guy comes through the door.

"Wha," the guy says. He's looking at Juan. "What the _fuck_ -" he starts, and Juan shoots him in the face. The back of the guy's head sprays out across the hallway wall and he drops, sliding down like a rag doll.

" _Motherfuck_!" Cesare shouts, at Juan. "I fucking told you!" He leans back over the guy on the floor, track pants guy. Points both guns at his face. "How many in the house?"

"Two," the guy says. "Just two." Cesare doesn't trust him as far as he can fucking throw him, but there's no more feet on the stairs, no sound from above or below. They'll have to clear rooms as they go.

"Where is she?" The guy points downward, towards the floor. "Go," Cesare hisses at Juan, and Juan goes. Cesare looks at the guy below him, clutching his leg with both hands and cursing and begging Cesare not to kill him, and it takes a second but something clears, like clouds pulling apart in the wind. Cesare recognizes him. Him, the car.

Everything.

He hurtles to the open door to the basement stairs, runs down them so fast he almost jumps the bottom three, and when he lands he sees Lucrezia on the floor in handcuffs and Juan's hand wrapped around her throat. He's trying to make her shut up, he's got another hand over the rag around her mouth, while she hits at him with her bound fists and makes an angry, high-pitched noise through her teeth. Juan looks up at Cesare and for a second there's silence, silence between them, and all around them the groaning of the house and the guy crying upstairs and Lucrezia's ragged breathing. "Get away from her," Cesare says. 

"I'm just trying to get her loose," Juan says. He puts his hands up. "Fine." He backs away and Cesare moves between them, standing over Lucrezia. She's wrestling the gag out of her mouth and spitting onto the floor, making disgusted noises. "I figured it out," Juan says, kind of cheerfully, like a thought just occurred to him. "Ricky and these two. These two used to work for me."

"I know," Cesare says. 

"That's probably how they met up," Juan says. "I fired these guys a while back." He looks down at Lucrezia. "This was probably revenge."

"This was you," Lucrezia hisses. "You shithead. You piece of shit-"

"Hey," Juan says. He steps closer and Cesare lifts the Beretta up between them. "You can't be serious," he says. His eyes are cold. "She's out of her mind. You don't know what kind of lies they told her."

"There's one still up there," Cesare says. "We can ask him."

Juan stares at him and his face is so blank for a second, it's like God took a sponge and wiped Cesare's brother out of this person, away, and left the body behind. Juan's mouth smiles. And then he lunges forward and grabs Cesare by both arms, hurls himself so hard they go toppling onto the dirt floor, rolling over each other. Cesare drops the Glock but hangs onto his own gun, tries to roll Juan away and push him off. Juan fights him like he's possessed, kicking and biting and trying to wrench the Beretta out of Cesare's hands. Cesare doesn't want to shoot him, doesn't really know what the fuck is going on at all, he knows Lucrezia is in the room still, can't see her, can't get Juan off of him. Juan twists his arm around and knocks the gun into Cesare's face, hard, and Cesare's head cracks back onto something, a fucking wooden chair or a table, he doesn't know. He rolls onto Juan but loses his grip on the gun, and Juan grabs it and pulls the trigger just as Cesare is trying to knock it away. The bullet scrapes across his left forearm and goes right fucking through his shoulder and Cesare falls backwards into space, reeling, blacking out for a split second and waking up as he hits the floor. Lucrezia is screaming and Cesare tries to get up, tries to stand, and collapses back against an old dresser, clutching the hole in his shoulder with his right hand. Juan stands up. There's a spray of blood across his face and chest, from shooting Cesare at such close range. Juan wipes his cheek while Lucrezia skids across the floor to put her hands over Cesare's shoulder, trying to hold him together even though she's still cuffed. Cesare pushes her away and tells her to get the fuck out of there, he talks nonsense at her and tries not to pass out again. He has to stay awake. He has to get her out of here. 

"I didn't do this," Juan says. Cesare stares up at him. "They weren't supposed to hurt you," he says, to Lucrezia.

"I don't believe you," Lucrezia says. Her voice trembles but her hands don't. Juan shrugs.

"This wasn't a kidnapping," he says. "I didn't want a fucking ransom for you. They fucked up. They weren't supposed to handcuff you and keep you, Lucrezia," he leans down and puts his face close to hers, snarls it out, "they were supposed to _fucking kill you_."

"No, Christ," Cesare says. He sits up, tries to get up on his knees, put himself between them. Lucrezia slides behind him like she understands what he's doing, but keeps one hand on his shoulder. "No. Why?"

"Why?" Juan shrieks. "Because we were _first_! We were fucking _first_ , we're the _firstborn_! We should have had everything! He's fed us fucking table scraps and you, you, Cesare," he says, and dangles the gun towards Cesare's face, "oh my God, you eat from his fucking table and you fuck his daughter, you take whatever he wants to give you. Fucking her doesn't make her family," Juan says. "If she died we'd get it all. We'd get everything-" Juan says, swinging his arm out wider, and Cesare goes for him, launches himself up and drives into Juan's middle with his good shoulder. He knocks the air out of Juan and hopes to God Lucrezia is already on the stairs; she could get down the block maybe, or hide someplace, Mike is coming, Mike would take care of her, but Mike doesn't know about Juan, _fuck_ , Cesare thinks, and tries to keep Juan down as long as he can. He will die in this basement, he will die if he has to, to give her a chance. But Juan grabs his shoulder, puts his thumb in the bullet hole and Cesare spasms. Juan clubs him with the gun and Cesare falls off him, backwards, and just as Juan is pointing the gun at him again somebody else fires, and Juan tips backwards and makes a horrible sucking sound of agony. Cesare turns and see Lucrezia standing by the stairs, motionless, holding the Glock he dropped. There's still a dirty rag tied around her neck, almost like a bandanna, like this is a costume in a play. Juan crawls backwards away from her, gasping in air, kind of hiccuping. The bullet went right into the meat of him, his chest, maybe nicked a lung. He's dropped the gun. He looks at Cesare with lost, terrified eyes. Cesare looks up at Lucrezia. He stands up slowly, wobbling a little, and holds out his hand. She gives him the Glock, grip-first, and he takes it with his right, holds it down against his hip. He watches Juan. Fat tears are welling up in Juan's eyes. "I love you," Juan says. "Cesare."

"I love you, too," Cesare says, and shoots him again. 

He gives the Glock back to Lucrezia and kneels down next to Juan, holds his face with his right hand while a little bit of blood bubbles out of Juan's mouth on the exhale, and Juan's eyes roll up into the back of his head. Cesare rubs a slow circle around his cheek with one thumb until Juan stops twitching. Mike finds them down there like that. Mike leaves Cesare be; he gets the cuffs of Lucrezia and puts her in the back of his car and then goes back to take care of the track pants guy, who had managed to drag himself into the backyard. And then Mike goes downstairs and pulls Cesare off of Juan, gets him a towel to wrap around his shoulder and the nick in his arm, helps him up the stairs and into the back seat of the car, where Lucrezia takes Cesare into her lap, cradles him and keeps pressure in the right places and strokes the hair back from his forehead. Mike drives a billion miles an hour to the hospital. He must call somebody on the way, Cesare misses that part entirely, because they're let in through a back door and put in a private room and Cesare gets prepped for surgery. He won't let go of Lucrezia until they stick a needle into his neck and he passes the fuck out. 

When he wakes up Lucrezia and Mike are sitting in hospital chairs at the corner of his bed, both of them still dirty-looking and in bloody clothes, and Rodrigo is standing on his other side. Rodrigo's hands are wrapped around the bed rail, and his eyes are red. 

"Cesare," he says. He reaches for Cesare's shoulder, and then pulls his hand back, smiles bitterly to himself, curls it back around the railing. "How are you feeling?" Cesare doesn't answer. He looks at Lucrezia. 

"I told him," she says, to Cesare. She looks at Rodrigo, Borgia to Borgia, iron-eyed. "I told them how Juan died saving my life." 

Cesare closes his eyes. 

__

__

__

__

The bullet went right through him, which is apparently considered a good thing. Better than the fucking alternative, Cesare supposes. His mother comes to see him, Rodrigo sends a car for her and even rides along himself, supporting her with one arm when she falters, acting like a doting husband. Vannozza cries and holds Cesare's good hand, the one that pulled the trigger, and presses kisses into the back of it. He doesn't know what to say to her. He doesn't say much at all. After five days of being in bed they tell him they can move him to a private facility if he wants to spend more time recuperating, and he tells them to wrap it the fuck up so he can go home. Mike picks him up with Lucrezia in the front seat, and a couple of her bags in the back. They drive back to the city and Lucrezia helps Cesare up the stairs, gets him settled in his own bed with his pain pills. Cesare dozes while Lucrezia reads in bed next to him, and Mike watches television in the living room. For the first week Cesare wakes up at weird times during the night and watches Lucrezia sleep, or goes out to sit on his couch and watch _Top Chef_ reruns with Mike, who always seems to be awake when Cesare is. 

"I'm sorry," Cesare says, when they are alone for a while, when Lucrezia is curled up on her side against him, stroking his chest through his t-shirt, tracing her hand over the muscles in his right arm. She kisses his shoulder and says, 

"What did you do?" 

"Fucked up your life," he says. "Fucked up your family." Lucrezia stares at him for a second and then rolls over and picks her phone off the bedside table; she thumbs through the menus and finds something and then holds it up for him to see it. It's a text message: _sweetie so glad you're safe hope you're okay be home very soon love from mommy_. Lucrezia turns the screen off and throws the phone over her shoulder. 

"She's still in Portugal," Lucrezia says. "You're my family. You're the," she says, and breaks, and puts her face into his shoulder for a second and breathes him in, and Cesare loops his good arm around her, holds her against him. "Cesare," she says, muffled a little by his shirt. "I'm sorry. I'm not sorry I did it, but I'm sorry, I'm sorry for you." He kisses the top of her head. They lie there together in the afternoon sunlight and Cesare wonders if they should go away somewhere when his arm heals, if he should take her to Spain or to Canada or something, someplace really fucking far away, for as long as they can both stand. Someplace he can put a ring on her finger, even if it's just pretend. He thinks about that and after a while she nuzzles her face into his neck and says, "Chezza." Her voice is soft, hopeful. "I know you said no. That we can't. But _I_ can't-" she says, and he leans up to her mouth and she leans over and kisses him, gently at first and then desperately. He curls his fingers around her neck and slants their mouths together, and Lucrezia sighs out soft breaths that he takes in, and for a little while there is nobody else alive in the world. 

"I'll give you anything," he says. Their lips are almost touching, their noses brush; Lucrezia smiles at him and he can feeling her smiling through his skin, his fingertips. She is a part of him, they make a circle, a perfect link. "Anything you want. All of me." 

"I accept," she says. 

__

__

__

__

____ "Backyard skulls, deep beneath the ground  
all those backyard skulls,  
not deep enough to never be found."  
- _Frightened Rabbit_


End file.
